Thursday, August 29, 2002
Today could be last game at Cinergy
If players strike, tickets could be valuable
By John Byczkowski jbyczkowski@enquirer.com
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The Reds are selling lottery tickets today. If the players strike Friday, today's business special against the St. Louis Cardinals could be the last Major League Baseball game ever at Cinergy Field, because the Reds will move into a new ballpark next year.
That means a ticket to today's game would become a collectible. Pay $5 for a Top 6 seat, put the unused, untorn ticket in a safe deposit box and count the days until retirement.
“If, in fact, Thursday is the last game,” said local collector Steve Wolter, “the best value will be in those tickets, full and unused.”
Look what's happened to tickets from the last game at Crosley Field, June 24, 1970. “Those tickets just keep going up and up. Right now, just a stub, retail is $100 to $150,” Mr. Wolter said. Full tickets are so rare it's hard to say what they're worth.
If today's game is the last at Cinergy, the 32-year-old stadium will end its historic run with no speeches, no ceremonies, no old-timers and no big crowd.
“If it is, it is,” said Reds broadcaster Marty Brennaman. “I think it would be kind of sad for a lot of reasons, if (today's) game was the last one played in this ballpark.
“I choose to think that it won't be, because I never felt there'd be a work stoppage and I don't now.”
As of Wednesday, tickets were available in all price ranges, including $32 seats in section 107, 12 rows from the field to the first-base side of home.
At ticket brokers Riverfront Choice Tickets, lower-level “blue” seats can be purchased for $20. “We're charging way less than face value for people to go see the Reds,” said Jeff McDonald of Riverfront Choice.
“Once (the players' union) set the strike date, everything changed. The phone stopped ringing,” he said. There's almost no demand right now, he said, for tickets for Cinergy's final weekend Sept. 20-22. Two of the three games are sold out, but fans aren't calling the brokers because they're not sure whether the game will be played, he said.
But there is good demand, he said, for the sold-out celebrity softball game Sept. 23 featuring Pete Rose.
The Reds aren't commenting, but they're not treating today's as just another game. Each home game usually has a Cincinnati police detail of about 20 officers, but at the request of the Reds, “we've added a few extra,” said Sgt. Joe Priestle, “just to make sure nothing does happen.”
What could happen? The history of sports arenas in America is dotted with last-game looting sprees by the fans. George Tahan of Boston, who collects stadium seats, said fans have been known to take anything that wasn't bolted down, and some things that were.
At the last baseball game at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh in 1970, fans tore down the manual scoreboard, walking off with numbers and signs. In 1994, at the last game at Chicago Stadium, home of the NBA Bulls and NHL Blackhawks, fans busted off seat numbers, especially going for Michael Jordan's 23 and Stan Mikita's 21. “All the 23s were gone,” he said.
In Cincinnati, how many 14s will survive? “If you bring a little screwdriver, you can pop those little numbers off pretty easily,” Mr. Tahan said.
“People will pull that stuff, the signs and anything. It's depends on how well (security) is set up to stop people.”
In general, though, Cinergy Field memorabilia has limited value, Mr. Wolter said. Because the stadium was built for the Reds and the football Bengals, everything is generic, lacking team insignias.
For instance, seats on the ends of aisles at Crosley Field had the Reds' “C” cast on the braces. Those seats are selling for $1,500 and up, Mr. Wolter said.
Cinergy seats, signs and other fixtures won't bring those kinds of prices, Mr. Wolter said, because the stadium “lacks the stuff unique to the Reds. All the signs are generic for football and baseball.”
If the added security might keep people from stealing signs, it also seems to have put a lid on fans bringing them in. Marty Prather of Springfield, Mo., a Cardinals fan who came to Cinergy for the games this week, heard walkie talkies going off around him when he held up a sign in the blue seats Tuesday.
The sign said, “Please let the umps call the strikes.”
He said security told him to put it away. The Reds' policy, he was told, forbids signs in the blue seats, and bans signs that comment on the labor situation.
Mr. Prather, who said he's been taking signs to ballparks since 1985, said he called ahead to make sure of the Reds' sign policy. The club's Web site says only that signs should be in good taste and should not block the view of other fans.
“I don't understand it,” he said. “They treat you like a villain.”
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Today could be last game at Cinergy
